Carp, Tilapia & Pangasius

The seafood most people can name, salmon, tuna, shrimp, is not the seafood that feeds the world. That role belongs to a group of farmed freshwater fish whose tonnage dwarfs everything on the premium end: carps, tilapia, and pangasius. Carps, taken together, are the highest-volume farmed fish on earth, produced overwhelmingly in China and across Asia. Tilapia is the second-largest group of farmed aquatic animals by quantity. Pangasius runs about 3.1 million tonnes, led by Vietnam at roughly 1.6 million tonnes. Together with salmonids and sea bass and bream, these species accounted for around 39.6 million tonnes in 2023, and the freshwater fish are the bulk of it.

The reason these fish, rather than others, is feed efficiency and tolerance. Carp and tilapia sit low on the food chain: they are herbivorous or omnivorous, they can be raised on feeds with little or no fishmeal, and in traditional polyculture several carp species are stocked in one pond to occupy different feeding niches, so the system captures more of the available food than a monoculture would. They tolerate warm, low-oxygen, and crowded water that would kill a salmon. They convert feed to flesh at least as efficiently as chicken. This is the cheapest animal protein humanity produces at scale, and its economics rest on the fish being undemanding rather than on anything sophisticated.

China is the centre of gravity, accounting for more than half the world's farmed fish, and the crucial point for a commodity book is that most of it never enters world trade at all. Chinese carp is produced and eaten domestically, frequently sold live in local markets, which is why a species group larger than salmon and shrimp combined has no international price, no benchmark, and almost no presence in Western seafood discussion. The tonnage is enormous and the tradeable volume is small, exactly the inverse of a market like salmon.

The exceptions that do trade are tilapia and pangasius, and they trade because they were engineered into export commodities. Both are farmed to a standard size, filleted, frozen, and shipped as an interchangeable white fillet competing largely on price with cod, haddock, and pollock. Vietnam built the pangasius industry along the Mekong specifically for export, and tilapia is farmed for export in China, Egypt, Indonesia, and Brazil. A frozen white fillet is close to a commodity in the strict sense: buyers substitute freely between species on price, which is why these fish set a floor under the whole whitefish complex.

Their trade history is unusually political. Because a cheap frozen fillet competes directly with domestic fisheries and farms in importing countries, pangasius in particular has attracted antidumping duties, labelling restrictions, and inspection regimes in the United States, and periodic quality scares in Europe. The commercial fight is fought through regulation rather than price, and the result is that market access, not production cost, is often the binding constraint on where the fish can be sold.

None of these species has a futures market, and none is likely to. The volume leader, carp, is a domestic Chinese product sold live. Tilapia and pangasius are traded as frozen fillets to specification, where size grade, colour, glaze percentage, and treatment matter as much as species, so there is no single deliverable. Pricing runs off export quotations from Vietnam, China, and Egypt, and delivered prices into the United States and the European Union. Where a processor hedges anything, it hedges feed, which is soybean meal and increasingly plant protein rather than fishmeal, since these fish need very little of it.